Our staff contains many levels of technology experience and aptitude. There needed to be a way to measure staff’s technology skills and assure that all staff is performing at a certain level. After a baseline can be established, we can grow our staff’s technology skills.

Create assessments for different staff levels (yearly), based on the level of technology they need to be responsible for. Roll out assessments to staff and build off of the material in the assessments to grow the organization’s technology abilities.

This project was added to our strategic plan as a priority. We’ve broken the project into a yearly rollout by staff group. Training staff, supervisors, and a few impacted staff (those who will take the assessments) develop main assessment areas and questions. This work is fine-tuned and added to an online repository. Assessments are structured to choose questions at random, so that staff won’t all be taking the same assessment.

To date, we’ve completed Circulation staff (2008) and Adult / Youth Specialist (2009) assessments and are in the process of developing Supervisor and Reference Librarian assessments in 2010.

We have assessed circulation staff (clerks and pages), and information services staff with these results:

• Clerks – 92% pass rate (2008)
• Pages – 98% pass rate (2008)
• Adult Specialists – 90% pass rate (2009)
• Youth Specialists and Librarians – 92% pass rate (2009)

Training staff and supervisors have met to discuss performance both generally (trends) and individually, to identify avenues for improvement. Staff have been scheduled for follow-up training either formally (in a class) or informally (one-on-one).

These assessments also help training staff to identify weak points in our curriculum. We have added three classes so far, based on the needs shown in the Technical Competency assessments.

• Intranet Overview
• Workflows Refresher (our ILS)
• Timecards